


A Man of Coyote's House

by MotherInLore



Series: Slayers West [1]
Category: Always Coming Home, Native American/First Nations Mythology, Slayers (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Crossover, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 14:17:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5166923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A brief discussion of cosmology, metaphysics, manners, and poop, around a lunch table.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Man of Coyote's House

**Author's Note:**

> Edited very slightly once I decided it wasn't going to be a one-off after all. Many of the variations on Native American stories come from _Always Coming Home_ so I can't take credit for them, either.

Amelia was the first to spot him. Lina and Gourry were, of course, too busy eating, and Zelgadis and Wehisho had been talking medical thaumaturgy for an hour and a half straight, and were now so deep in that they didn't notice when the other two cleaned their plates for them.

"....don't think the parallel with scar tissue really gets us anywhere..."

"...very exciting, because we have the sevai and vedet, where the map goes wrong. So to change the map a body follows...."

"...matter of scale...."

"Um, excuse me? Everybody?" Nobody gave her any indication of having heard. "Look over there by the window. Isn't that...." Amelia didn't know why she was phrasing it as a question, because it obviously was, and they'd all seen him too often to be mistaken. He sat there, every violet hair in place, sipping tea, smiling vaguely, and not looking at all as though he were about nudge them all into mortal peril and try to destroy the world again. The ...man... had a track record, though. So much for any last, forlorn hope that this adventure was going to be an ordinary treasure hunt.

At first Amelia thought no one had heard her, but then Gourry swallowed another pint or so of succotash and peered briefly around the pile of empty bowls in front of him. "Oh! Hiya Xellos!" Gourry waved, sunnily, and then went back to eating. Lina and Zel both turned around and groaned simultaneously.

Wehisho wasn't surprised that these foreigners knew each other. The new one looked exactly like the others, except that his cloak was improbably clean, given the state of the roads. "That one troubles you?" she asked the table generally.

The newcomer was gathering up his teapot, very precisely and deliberately, and threading his way through the crowd of sailors toward them. Zelgadis answered her in a rapid undertone that strained Wehisho's grasp of the _lingua franca,_ TOK: "Xellos is a Monster- a Mazoku. They feed on pain, misery, and destruction, and serve the Lord of Nightmares, embodiment of chaos. He is more powerful than any of us, probably including Lina, and only corporeal when he feels like it. And so far, every time we've run into him we've avoided the end of the world only by the skin of our teeth."

Wehisho stared. "Is this indeed the truth?" Zel nodded. 

Wehisho sprang off the bench and bowed, one hand at her collarbone. "Bless me and be blessed, healer from Coyote's house." 

There was a crash of breaking crockery behind her. For the barest instant, Wehisho was fixed by five pairs of startled eyes. Then the mazoku's face returned to its customary expression and only the other four were staring. Xellos laughed, lightly, and ran the hand that wasn't holding his tea through his hair, cradling the back of his head with his hand. "Well..." he said, "Blessing is not really what I do." He set his tea things down on the table, insinuated himself into the seat Wehisho had just vacated and twitched his cloak into place. 

Lina sputtered. "Di-did you just call th-that-- Did you just call him a healer? _A HEALER???_ " But then she had to snatch her mutton chops back from Gourry, who had recovered faster than she had.

Wehisho blinked. "The stone boy said he was." 

Xellos' mouth widened a millimeter or two into a brief smirk. "Did he really?" 

Zel declined to answer, being too busy muttering to himself. "...'boy!' I bet I'm older than she is..." 

"He said you eat pain." Wehisho explained. 

Gourry came up for air. "Oh! Right! Of course. Hey, waiter! More shrimp, please?" He tried to summon the harried innkeeper, then stopped when Lina shoved an empty kettle over his head. 

"What do you mean 'of course,' you jellyfish!" 

Gourry managed to shrug while still trying to pull off the kettle, which kept getting caught on his chin. His voice echoed. "Well, obviously, when you eat something, it isn't there anymore." One hand waved dangerously near the stack of empty dishes. "And if someone makes pain not be there anymore, they're a healer." 

And that was Gourry for you, Amelia reflected. He usually floated through life like the jellyfish Lina called him: forgetting the names of mortal enemies, declining to be bothered with any magical details or even unnecessary vocabulary (he still thought "fiancee" was a kind of pickle), but then, every so often and no more than once a year, he caught up faster than anyone else in the room and made a leap of... yes, it _was_ logic, she decided. The implications made her heart lift. Because she'd always felt guilty before when she found herself liking the mazoku, but... She just couldn't contain herself. 

"I knew it!" she crowed. "I just knew that deep down inside, you really are a good person after all, Mister Xellos!" 

Mister Xellos turned slightly green and screwed his mouth and eyes shut, while Zel pried Amelia from around his neck. Wehisho, still standing, wrinkled her forehead. "I am not sure that is altogether correct, Amelia-bin. They are sacred, those people at the hinge, but that doesn't mean we let Coyote into our sheepfolds at lambing time." 

"The who at the what?" Gourry emerged from the kettle with an audible pop. 

Wehisho had already learned something of her chances in getting through to the swordsman, but she answered gamely enough. "The ones who live in the other direction, the ones who eat what we cast out. Buzzard, Blowfly, Worm, and Coyote most of all, of course. We say she ate the old world, when it was dying." 

"And does she rule the realm of chaos, 'shining golden on the waters?' " Zelgadis was bitter and sarcastic. Wehisho's logic could go sideways even faster than Lina's did, and that was saying something. "Because that's who this 'healer' belongs to." 

Wehisho laughed outright. "How do you _rule_ chaos? That sounds like trying to milk a hammer, or pleat a rainstorm! In the Valley, we say that Coyote's house is the wilderness, and the walls of that house are the wind blowing. We say she ate the poisoned City and shat out mountains behind her, that she dug rivers and that oak forests grow in her footprints." 

"Oh, her," Xellos murmured. 

"Are you hungry, then?" Wehisho asked him, "because, after lunch I was going to visit a friend of mine. Her husband has been ill with the vedet for more than a year now, and they are both suffering." 

None of the other four quite managed to say anything. Zelgadis banged his forehead down on the edge of the table. Lina flopped in her chair and nearly toppled backward. Xellos pursed his lips. "That is very...hospitable... of you," he allowed. He cast a disgusted glance at the back of Zel's head. "And I must admit, self-pity is not very filling."

Zelgadis' attempt to sit up and glare at them both was temporarily thwarted by the need to yank free a few hairs that had nailed themselves into the table. "That. Is. Just. _Wrong!_ " 

"It's only courtesy." 

"To a _mazoku?_ " 

"To any person I work with! Especially the ones who live in the other direction, because we need them so badly." Wehisho's voice relaxed into a chanting rhythm. The Doctor's Lodge was full of Coyote songs; so much of their work was at that same hinge between death and life. "Praise the earthworm who transforms our midden to compost, praise the maggot who cleans the poisoned flesh from the wound, to become shining and winged... So yes, I can also be polite to a mazoku who transforms pain into... what _do_ mazokude excrete?"

Xellos' mouth had been twitching throughout Wehisho's recital, and now he flinched. "That," he gargled, "is a secret."


End file.
